devilmakes

My Rating ~ Four Stars

4-gold-stars copy

RELEASE DATE: 14 September 2021

Format: E-ARC

Pages: 368

Publisher: Titan Books

Blurb

Tess Matheson only wants three things: time to practice her cello, for her sister to be happy, and for everyone else to leave her alone.

Instead, Tess finds herself working all summer at her boarding school library, shelving books and dealing with the intolerable patrons. The worst of them is Eliot Birch: snide, privileged, and constantly requesting forbidden grimoires. After a bargain with Eliot leads to the discovery of an ancient book in the library’s grimoire collection, the pair accidentally unleash a book-bound demon.

The demon will stop at nothing to stay free, manipulating ink to threaten those Tess loves and dismantling Eliot’s strange magic. Tess is plagued by terrible dreams of the devil and haunting memories of a boy who wears Eliot’s face. All she knows is to stay free, the demon needs her… and he’ll have her, dead or alive.

Review

Thank you so much to Titan Books for sending me a copy of this book, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review!

Tess is working at her school library when she meets Eliot Birch. She immediately dislikes him as just another one of the rich boys, with the headmaster as a father to top it off. She hopes she doesn’t see much of him at all. But when she feels pressured into taking Eliot into a forbidden part of the library, they stumble across an ancient book and accidentally unless a devil.

Eliot doesn’t want to be at school in the US. He wants to be at home in the UK, where his mother is dying. Both Eliot and his mother possess magic, but nothing Eliot can do seems to be the answer to saving her. With his father intent on keeping him away from her, he intends to find a way to make her healthy again.

As the Devil they’ve unleashed infiltrates their lives in terrifying ways, they’ll need to figure out how to undo what has been done.

This book was actually quite terrifying and I found myself trying my hardest NOT to picture half the scenes too clearly in my mind, so I still had some hope of sleeping again. Although the story took place in a modern setting, the language used by the devil gave the book quite a gothic feel. There was this strange mix of straight up horror scenes, alongside flowery, romantic writing. I’m not a big fan of the flowery romance stuff and it would have worked as a general horror book without it for me, but somehow it came together in a way I still appreciated.

I know from the synopsis, some readers might think they’re getting another Sorcery of Thorns here, but I found The Devil Makes Three to be far more of a horror novel, even with the magical aspects. I am enjoying thriller and horror much more than fantasy right now (although witches are never unwelcome in a book for me!) so I really enjoyed this one!